Do local tv stations accept commercials shot in HDV format (1440x1080)

Yes and no.

TV stations certainly accept commercials shot on HDV, which was your original question.

A station doesn't care about the camera acquisition format one bit. You can shoot in on a 30-year-old Fisher Price Pixelvision camera if you want, they don't care... they'll still take the money and air the spot.

They won't, however, accept commercials delivered on HDV.

You really shouldn't try to deliver anything to anyone on HDV anyway. HDV is (despite what some people say) a great acquisition format. The footage is great as it comes out of the camera. But you should really stop living in the HDV world at that point. It's not a good editing format as is it so compressed, and it's a terrible mastering format... which is what you are looking at to deliver. Here we do shoot in HDV, but we capture as uncompressed 10-bit avi files... thus the footage is never HDV again. That way it's much easier to edit with, and always looks great with no generational re-compression or loss. Some people do capture as HDV and edit from the HDV files, but you still shouldn't try to master back to HDV.

Almost all TV stations and cable systems will accept (and most will prefer) Mpeg2 files. And they must be 29.97fps, and most want interlaced files. Here, we produce almost everything at 24p (23.976fps), so our very last stage is converting the 24fps progressive file to a 30fps interlaced file to make the mpg file for delivery.

Some stations will also accept .mov files, but not all of them will as some don't like Quicktime. Some will accept other types as well... but if you provide mpeg2 files those are fairly universally accepted.

You'll have to ask each place you wish to deliver a spot to. Usually their traffic department will have the answer to that... and there are usually fairly specific specs you have to follow as to file type, size, bitrate, and all that. And they are not all the same... some of the places that we deliver to, for example, REQUIRE that we have bars, tone, and slates on commercial spots. However other places FORBID it, and any spots that have those will be rejected. We have a big "upload bible" here that gives the specs for each place that gets files from us. You just have to ask them.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

You didn't say what your editing platform is, but whatever it is you need to be working in a 1920x1080 project/timeline. Your 1440x1080 will be displayed properly in that window, unless you have the aspect ratio set at something funky. You'll do the rest of the work in 1920x1080.

Think of it this way... the footage you shoot is technically 1440x1080 (although it appears 1920x1080 because the pixels end up getting stretched horizontally), but that's the last time you should use that ratio. Everything is edited at 1920x1080. And your final master is made at 1920x1080. As is the mpeg file for delivery.

As for "will the commercial be able to be played in High definition on a local tv station's HD channel?"... you'll just have to ask them. Many stations accept HD commercials... but many do not, even though the station broadcasts in HD. Our company mostly produces broadcast commercials, and even though we produce everything in HD, we always make a standard-def NTSC (letterboxed) version as well, as that's what many television stations and cable systems still require.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

For what it's worth -- I've shot some TVCs (in the UK) on the older 35mbs XDCAMHD cams. The 1440 footage was directly ingested into Final Cut and upscaled to 1920x1080i .mov for delivery. ITV (client) broadcast engineers have never complained, although there's no excuse for HDV nowadays when pre-approved full-res cams, e.g. EX3, are so cheap to hire. (Presumably affordable on a TVC budget, anyway.)

If the budget also covers the portable storage, then Todd's tip of bypassing all HDV cameras' capture devices and tapping it straight out uncompressed is essential stuff -- and will probably put a smile on your face when you finally view the image your sensor is really capturing.

Darren.

I used to work in Master Control at a local TV station and I can tell you they would NEVER turn away ANY spot regardless of how it was delivered. Deliver in HDV and they'll find a way to get it into the system. Their PREFERED delivery was DVD or BetaSP for standard definition and Blu-Ray or a file on a USB drive for HD. If you delivered in USB, the only thing the station would tell the production companies was to make sure it was a codec and file format (QuickTime) that would load cleanly in Avid.

As for resolution, they didn't care.